Grammatical errors in the post itself notwithstanding (Muphry's law is axiomatic in this type of post, and likely also in this article describing it), The Reg thinks Torvalds is correct. The passive construction, which may be found in scientific papers and technical writing, can be confusing and annoying. It creates a lack of clarity that leads not only to confusion about responsibility or agency, but often hides important information about who should be doing what and when. Ideal for certain vendor manuals, then. //

The Linux supremo declared:

But what does make extra work is when some maintainers use passive voice, and then I try to actively rewrite the explanation (or, admittedly, sometimes I just decide I don't care quite enough about trying to make the messages sound the same). So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative. //

Illustrating the point, and showing how far the Linux kernel chieftain has come from his more belligerent days, Torvalds said he'd "love it" (yep, he's a new man) if people would avoid writing their "descriptions as 'In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference.' Instead, write it as 'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..'"

The directive comes years after the great punctuation rant of 2016, where Torvalds pressed "brain-damaged shit-for-brains devs" to drop the "disgusting drug-induced crap" and use asterisks properly. He's toned it down several notches, basically.